What you're using is as good as anything you can get. Keep it as clean as possible and play with the shade settings. As our eyes age we often have to lighten the shade slightly. I notice you're wearing glasses. Bifocals won't work. You'll never see anything properly. If you can eliminate the glasses and use a cheater lens in the helmet instead you may find that helps as well.

If you can read without your glasses try welding doing the same. If you're inclined you may want to use safety glasses. I find the less layers of glass between me and the weld, the better I like it.

The other thing that might help is getting rid of the bulky glove on your gun hand. A tig glove will give you much better control. I use the relatively cheap brown gloves. They're a light leather and unlined. You don't need the perfectly made white form fitting gloves even if they are more stylish.

I almost always go gloveless on the hand feeding the filler rod when I'm tig welding. That's old school and I doubt that it's recommended any more. My guess is that it encourages melanoma caused by the strong UV rays produced by the arc.

There's no reason to go gloveless when you're mig welding. I tend to use my non gun hand to help steady my hand / gun hand to produce a much better quality weld. This causes that hand to be relatively close to the action and the extra protection is welcome.

That two handed method seems like a good idea. Tomorrow I will try it with a lighter glove on the gun hand.

This lobster back thing connects the muffler to the collector. Three exhaust setups will be tried on the dyno. One will be the megga. The other will be this connector pipe without the muffler. A "blooey" pipe is what my father called this. The third will be the muffler.

The muffler might work best. The last version of this engine put out its best performance with mufflers.

The welding bay is at the front of the boat shed where I poured the floor last summer. It is a patch of concrete as wide as the shed and six feet long. I was welding the muffler bracket, flipped up my mask to look at the weld, and stepped back off of the edge of the slab. Fortunately I did not impale myself on anything when I hit the deck. Finishing the slab is a priority now. Today exactly 3 feet 4.5 inches length was added.

A Sawzall is what I use to cut metal and I have done this for decades. It does not work well for tubing and especially for thin wall. The teeth catch on the tube and the tube gets bent. So, it is time for a metal chop saw that uses a cutting disk. There are all sorts of nice saws made in China. I want one made here or in some non-commie country. There is one brand made in the US. I will get less saw for my money. The warm and fuzzy feeling of keeping my money here persuades me to order it.

The lady that orders these things for me in Portland says these guys make the saws after the order is placed and it takes six weeks to build one plus a week or two for shipping. That is too long and I cancel the order. She calls back. They can make the saw in three weeks and take a week to ship it. This is OK so I reorder it.

It arrives in the Rose City. I take a day off from work and drive up there to get it. It is in a wooden crate so I do not get a good look at it. It is uncrated when I get home. It looks like a nice saw until I start to use it. It was ordered as a single phase 230 volt saw. There is one of those dinky three prong 15 or 20 amp 115 volt plugs on the cord. I look at the internal wiring for the saw motor. It is set up for 230 volts. What the heck?

The cutting disk goes down till it cuts the table in half. There is no blade stop. It is missing. Mary Jane must be legal where they make that saw.

An e-mail is sent to the idiots that made this thing. The president of the company e-mails me back. He says there are a variety of 230 volt outlets and plugs. They put the 115 volt plug on 'cause they do not know what 230 V outlet I have.

This is discussed with the legal and electrical guys at my job. The legal expert says the first person that plugs this thing into a 115 volt outlet and gets electrocuted will be dead and I do not have to worry about him or her. The family of the stiff could sue me and if they found out that I knowingly had something like this I could be exposed to criminal negligence charges. He also said my insurance coverage might be null and void if this thing causes a fire. The electric expert said the saw will trip a circuit breaker and it will not start so no one will get hurt.

Either way, the saw cannot be used as is. I e-mailed the president and told him to ship a proper cord and a blade stop pronto. I sure miss the WWII generation. They took things more seriously. This would not be happening if they were in charge.

I'll bet the president of that company blames Harbor Freight for their own lack of business success. Waiting until an order is placed before building a chop saw is not the way to market such a low-level "commodity" tool. Then, after 3 weeks for a custom build, to deliver it without the necessary parts installed illustrates this company's incompetence.

I prefer a US-made product, too, but I expect it to have at least the quality of a cheap import.

No help seems to be coming from the company. It looks like I will be fixing it.

The cylinder head is done and Kibblewhite shipped it to Swain Tech in New York. The thermal barrier will go on the exhaust tracts, combustion chambers, and valve faces as recommended by Kibblewhite. The coating will also go on the radius faces of the valves and the inlet tracts as per my preference.

The fellow that did all the work is Mike Perry, the head of the Kibblewhite research and development department. The worked on this thing on weekends and at home in addition to the time spent at the business. He saved my land speed program. Lots of this stuff is custom built and I cannot buy it anywhere.

The details of how this head is set up can be posted if anyone wants to see what was done.

Bo, being patriotic is a good thing when it's practical but there are times when you're much better off buying an American brand such as Milwaukee or DeWalt which is at least providing American jobs on the distribution end, is properly engineered and has a proper guarantee. I imagine the president of the company you corresponded with was just taking time off from assembling saws in his garage to hit the computer for a short while. You'll probably also find your American saw is assembled on this continent from mainly Asian parts. The guy obviously doesn't understand electricity and in that regard he's just plain dangerous and it sounds like the saw itself may fall in the same category in that it's missing critical parts to make it work properly. The best thing that could happen is that he be shut down before someone gets seriously hurt.